American Customer Care Selects TierPoint

Introduction
Since 1986, American Customer Care (ACC) has specialized in providing individualized outsourced solutions for their clients. With call centers located across the country, the company utilizes state-of-the-art technology to deliver a comprehensive suite of customer contact center solutions designed to help solidify and enhance client relationships with existing customers, as well as to acquire new ones.

Thanks to rampant growth year over year, the underlying technology infrastructure powering ACC’s footprint of offices and call centers exploded in scale and complexity. With compliance regulations entering the mix, it became apparent that the company would need to find a partner for colocation and managing its technology infrastructure architecture.

The question of outsourcing IT infrastructure was one that ACC Director of IT Infrastructure Services Rich Hawley had long contemplated. While outsourcing ACC’s technology infrastructure would add resiliency and enhance security, Hawley was concerned about accessibility for his staff of IT administrators and maintaining control over an outsourced environment. Compounding the concerns, the company also had compliance mandates to which it was required to adhere.

“At the time we were undertaking a PCI DSS compliance project, and we had different clients from different verticals running audits all the time,” said Mr. Hawley. “Our infrastructure had to match the specifications of our clients’ compliance regulations. As we continued to grow, the question kept coming up from partners and clients — Why are you running your own data center?”

Making the Move to TierPoint
In his search for a managed IaaS partner, Mr. Hawley had three top criteria in mind:

Compliance – Meeting the various compliance benchmarks required by ACC and their clients would be absolutely vital. These include the standards set by PCI DSS, HIPAA and more.

Facility Health and Resiliency – Any facility that would house ACC’s infrastructure would have to meet and exceed the high standards set when building their own in-house data center. Redundant power and network connectivity were a must, as well as flexible space for future growth.

Support – ACC needed a partner who could take on the support and maintenance of its technology infrastructure, allowing its own IT staff to focus on internal systems and optimization.

American Customer Care’s journey to TierPoint began with a data center tour. “We were impressed from the time of our first visit,” said Mr. Hawley. “The data center facility presents incredibly well. From the new construction to the responsiveness of the staff who worked there, we immediately got the feeling that this is where we wanted to be.”

Working with TierPoint’s team of Sales, Sales Engineers and Solutions Architects, the IT decision makers of American Customer Care began to look over their criteria for a successful IaaS partnership. And TierPoint’s resources presented the company’s long track record of crafting customized IT plans.

“Our biggest challenges were compliance, travel for our IT staff, and the ownership trust factor in terms of moving our mission-critical infrastructure to an outside provider,” Hawley said. “In the end, it really came down to a matter of trust.”

The Benefits of Outsourced IaaS Management
Since moving to TierPoint in 2011, American Customer Care has not second guessed the move to an outsourced IaaS environment.

“We’ve been super happy with everything at TierPoint,” Hawley said. “The support team has been great; they continually work with us to support our dynamic environment. We’ve moved our core production to the TierPoint data center, including a Windows-based phone system running on Dell hardware, SIP gateways, voice circuits and data circuits, VMware blade servers, and more.”

In addition to top support and a highly-available data center operating environment, American Customer Care has also experienced cost savings from colocating with TierPoint.

“We’ve seen significant cost savings in terms of circuits, cabinets and hardware, support hours, Internet connectivity, and the power, cooling and other data center infrastructure. In fact, the cost of those items at TierPoint was offset by cancelling a single DS3 circuit with another provider,” Hawley said.

“Our biggest challenges were compliance, travel for our IT staff, and the ownership trust factor in terms of moving our mission-critical infrastructure to an outside provider. In the end, it really came down to a matter of trust.”
Rich Howley